SYRFILM closes with Argentine feature, The Irish Prisoner

The Irish Prisoner/El Prisionero Irlandés (2015, RT 100 min.)

Directors: Carlos Jaureguialzo & Marcela Silvay y Nasute

Cast: Alexia Moyano, Tom Harris, Alberto Benegas

     One special pleasure of this annual SYRFILM is the return to festival screens of movies from Argentina, which have been absent for several years but helped create the momentum of the festival’s beginnings a dozen years ago. Visually lush, with high production values and terrific performances of depth and nuance, Argentine cinema is a rapidly acquired taste. Originally the festival scheduled three Argentine features; although one dropped out, the two remaining close out the Palace’s Sunday evening program. Daniella Goggi’s Abzurdah (2015), based on a popular autobiographical novel and breaking box office records this year in Buenos Aires, screens at 5:00 PM. At 7:00, there’s the historical drama The Irish Prisoner, whose lead actress, Alexia Moyano, who’s been here at the festival since Wednesday, will do the Q&A.

     Overhsadowed by the more recent Falkland Islands skirmishes between Argentina and the UK, England’s ill-fated attempts to invade Argentina and take Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807 are sometimes called collectively “the forgotten invasion.” They occurred in the context of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, in which Spain and France allied against England. The immediate aim was to hurt the French-Spanish alliance by wounding Spain through her South American colonies, but the longer goal was potential access to South America’s vast wealth if trade could be established. Both attempts fell pitifully short: the initial invasion of the Plate River basin in June 1806 was repulsed in about three months, and 1807’s May invasion collapsed even quicker. But the Argentine militias who successfully defended themselves against the British both times created a sense of national identity and fueled a nascent independence movement. Three years after the second British attempt, Argentina had formed a home-rule government and in 1816, declared full independence; by 1826, similar rebellions in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, aided by Argentina, effectively ended Spanish dominance on the continent.

     The Irish Prisoner begins in 1806 in the tiny settlement of La Carolina in the mountains of Argentina’s San Luis province with the funeral procession of Ambrosio Ochoa, which stops at his humble farmhouse, now occupied by his widow Luisa (Alexia Moyano), her farmhand Sixto (Alberto Benegas), and her young son. Ambrosio’s death, it is whispered, will promote this idea of independence, and Ambrosio’s somewhat dandified brother is intent upon marrying Luisa, taking over the land and taking his brother’s widow and son back to the capital with him. Luisa will have none of it, though she sleeps with a rifle, and struggles mightily to manage a farm with only an old man and a child for help.

     We come upon this family tragedy after the English invaders have been repulsed and cool their heels as prisoners. One such lot is kept in a stable in town; rumors fly about their execution as they’re moved inland away from the harbor and dispersed in the countryside to prevent their rescue or escape.

    The Irish prisoner of the title is Conor Doolin (Tom Harris), deeply at odds with his commander, who provokes him constantly with the epithet “Croppy.” It turns out there was a heavy percentage of Irish among this invading force. 1806 is just eight years past the Irish rebellion of 1798, memorable for who made up the United Irishmen – both liberal non-Anglican Protestants (mostly Presbyterians), some of them well-to-do, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, and Irish Catholics, making common cause against the British. It was this alliance that the British sought to destroy in sowing dissension among the two faiths, a legacy that persists even today in some quarters. Martial law in ’98 created generations of antipathy following house burnings, torture, and some mass murders on both sides.

     Conor Doolin’s father was a member of the United Irishmen (he carries a metal pin with him throughout the story which he eventually passes on to his own son). So it is this backdrop against which Conor Doolin reacts when his sergeant sneers at him as “Croppy,” an epithet based on the close-cropped haircuts that were a statement by French sympathizers among the Irish during the 1790s – enough to get one arrested in some places. But not enough to keep the Irish out of conscription into English military service. Though Conor indignantly claims he's "no Croppy," he later lectures an old farmhand about how the English stole Irish land.

     In fact – just as happens in The Irish Prisoner – some of the captured English troops of Irish extraction were given the option to stay in Argentina and chose to do so. Nearly 300 of them settled there instead of going back to Europe, later joined the fight for independence, later still assisted other anti-Spanish rebellions on the continent too, both intermarrying with Argentines and establishing an eventually sizable community of Irish who hosted others who followed them to settle.

     As a film, The Irish Prisoner is nowhere near as didactic as I have just been! In fact, the story of Luisa and Conor established the barest of factual scaffolds with this history. But the scaffold the film does establish is sound and accurate and the film has such a sweetness about this long-brewing romance, which has its share of sorrows – Luisa must meet another funeral procession at her gate, hunching against the cold wind with her thin shawl, twice more – that one can’t help appreciating that such a film was clearly made as a labor of love and remembrance.

     Conor gets from his rude, make-shift prison to Luisa’s farm because of a horrible storm that nearly wrecks her homestead and from which she might not recover if her old farmhard, Sixto, had not asked the town commander to send her some help. Captain Lucero protests he has too few man already but he could send one of the English, who in turn send the least of their number. Conor agrees, and appears at Luisa’s doorstep to do the hard labor of clean-up and re-building, sleep shivering outside with Sixto, and participate in a hesitant approach between himself and Luisa’s young son. The Irish harbors dreams of escape, of course, secretly panning for gold nuggets, asking as he starts to learn the language in which direction is the sea, and seeming to plan a theft of Luisa’s small band of horses. Conor has a way with horses, and these remind him of the hardy Connemara ponies from home. The work of caring for horses provides the medium in which his work with old Sixto grows and the means by which they must learn one another’s language. They begin with “horse.” When the season grows cold, Conor teaches Luisa “snow.” The characters in this film talk because they must talk, often comically not understanding a word the other says and clearly finding one another extremely odd, until gradually comprehension dawns.

    So of course the homestead gets into Conor’s bones and under his skin. He marries Luisa after some years, they have a boy too, and the call to fight for independence comes a number of times, taking its toll. We leave Luisa at her gate, where she began those years ago.

    It would hard to resist the rough but somberly beautiful mountains of La Carolina, which landscape time and again dwarfs the characters with its sheer mass and huge sky. Americans can read this film easily as a kind of Western, as a settlement of wilderness, but there’s enough strangeness in the landscape to evoke a sense of the uncanny in us that sets us, as watchers, on alert. The performances are uniformly excellent and because these actors are also unknown mostly to American audiences, this also provokes a new attention. Alexia Moyano is particular brings an emotional clarity and ease to her performance which makes actresses in similar roles seem mannered in the extreme.

You’ll want to watch The Irish Prisoner a second time too. That’s why I’ll be in the audience at the festival’s closing Sunday night.

Indie Classic "Wildrose" Opens Syracuse International Film Festival

Wildrose (1984, RT 93:00)

Director: John Hanson

Cast: Tom Bower, Lisa Eichhorn

Producer: Sandra Schulberg, New Front Films

     When the 1983 indie classic Wildrose screens here in Syracuse at the Palace Theater tomorrow evening, lead actor Tom Bower and director John Hanson will both be on hand as guests of the Syracuse International Film Festival. Wildrose is the festival’s opening night kick-off film and John Hanson will receive a Sophia, SYRFILM’s life-time achievement award. It’s Hanson’s first visit to Syracuse, but he’ll be here in part because of what he says he’s heard from Bower and filmmakers Rob Nilsson and Robert M. Young, who’ve both been here in years past to screen films. Both Bower and Hanson will talk about the making of Wildrose and the kind of progressive indie cinema it exemplifies.

     Many Central New York filmgoers, especially the kind who stray beyond the multiplexes, will already be primed for a film that celebrates ordinary working people – in Wildrose, the iron and taconite miners in northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Range (with a subplot involving their Lake Superior counterparts, the commercial fishermen of Bayfield, Wisconsin). We’ve had two new films about working people screen here in just the past month.

     The Erie Canal Museum premiered the short documentary, Boom and Bust: America’s Journey on the Erie Canal, on September 12^th, to a crowded Saturday afternoon audience downtown. This included many of the people in the film who’d traveled from around the state, itself under-scoring that the Canal’s impact isn’t just a distant historical topic. The brain-child of ECM curator Dan Ward, who’s been collecting and archiving oral histories of the Canal for years, Boom and Bust examines cycles of commercial expansion and decline along the Canal and how these affected the workers in steel, grain, textiles and shipping who lived along the Canal’s pathway..

     Then, on September 25^th, the 13^th annual Human Rights Film Festival screened Kentucky-born filmmaker Chad Stevens’ Overburden, also to a packed auditorium, this one on the Syracuse University campus. Stevens’ film chronicles the aftermath of the largest mining disaster in forty years, the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 coal-miners in West Virginia. Eventually there was an indictment of Massey Energy’s former CEO Don Blankenship on conspiracy charges for his involvement in the disaster and deaths, the first-ever such indictment. Blankenship’s federal trial began last week on October 7^th. Overburden uses the unlikely alliance between pro-coal activist Betty Harrah and environmentalist Loreilei Scarbro – they joined forces around working conditions – to examine the toll of mountaintop removal on land and people alike.

     Tom Bower has been making indie films from the viewpoint of working people for most of his career. Theatrically released in June, his latest feature, Runoff (2014), depicts an economically depressed rural Kentucky community’s encounter with agri-business and the chemicals associated with GMO crops.  Bower plays a turkey farmer named Scratch who’s got some tanks of expired fertilizer that he can’t afford to dispose of properly, so he enlists a reluctant but vulnerable neighbor whose husband’s business and health alike are failing.

     Runoff is the first feature film of Kim Levin, long associated with the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville. Bower points out that Runoff is “entirely homegrown – it was completely supported by donors from Kentucky.” He also told me that Levin has a science background herself as a former biochemist. The festival sought to bring Runoff here for a screening along with Wildrose, but the film’s current licensing agreement prevents that at this point. Still, Runoff is pretty easy to watch: besides streaming on Netflix and Amazon, it’s just out on DVD.

     Wildrose had a 30-year anniversary screening last year in Minneapolis and screened in NYC in July at BAM as a classic. But, although the story begins in 1976, the film easily holds its own with contemporary films on similar topics. Wildrose occurs during a moment when women miners, unwelcome in the mines to begin with, were under particular pressure because of an economic downturn that put everyone’s job at risk and heightened resentment against women for “taking men’s jobs.” Director John Hanson, who moved to the small town of Eveleth where Wildrose is set two years before actually making the film, was joined after six months by the film’s producer Sandra Schulberg, and together they set out to “find the story.” He recalls, “Every family was affected by the question of whether women belonged in the mines. It tore marriages and whole families apart. When we got there in 1980, the mines were all going full-bore. By the time we were ready to shoot, all the mines had shut down and all the women were laid off. I had to re-write the script.”

     Both Bower and Hanson pointed out that the situation remains precarious today for the Mesabi Range miners. In mid-August, 400 miners were laid off work because, as Hanson tells it, “the market’s been flooded with cheap Chinese iron.”

   Wildrose frames its story through the romance between June Lorich (Lisa Eichhorn), an Eveleth native who’s left an abusive marriage to an alcoholic and is working at the local iron mine, and Rick Ogaard (Tom Bower), formerly a commercial fisherman on Lake Superior, who’s trying his luck in the mines. Rick “negotiates” June’s rule that she never dates co-workers by inviting her to a “fish boil” back home in Bayfield, Wisconsin. There, she meets his mother and family, and Rick considers returning to take up fishing again with his brother.

     John Hanson told me that June really “lives in two different worlds – she’s very rooted in the place of Eveleth, and the landscape is really a character too. Story and character and landscape are all intertwined.” On the one hand, there’s the raw, massively gaping wound across the land that is the mine itself, something we see in aerial shots very early in the film. But before that, crucially, we see June in the woods, hand-building a log cabin by a lake – her own home in the wilderness, an image that resonates with and harkens back to every settler film ever made. June’s best friend seems to be an old Finnish woman with whom she takes walks, visits the cemetery, picks berries, makes a meal. Belying the notion that women working is some new social evil, Katn (Lydia Olson) reminisces about working in a lumber camp in her youth and the roughnecks there, assuring June, “You can handle them men!” As mine lay-offs accelerate – the women go first, of course – June also decides against joining some friends for work prospects in Oklahoma. So when Rick does return to Bayfield to take up fishing again, and wants June to join him there permanently, she tries it. But we’re not surprised that her dilemma returns or that initially it’s couched in terms of her need to have a job.

     Wildrose is prescient in its sensitivity to the friction of changing gender roles. It’s no coincidence that Rick and June begin by “negotiating” how the relationship will go, and a great deal else. When June reacts badly to their first intimacies, suddenly reminded of her ex’s mistreatment, Rick manages to get past his impulse to take it personally. He says, “What the hell – anyone can have a nightmare. My brother Chris is afraid of drowning. One night I helped him bail.”

      The film also handles gender issues within June’s family, as her parents coax her back to Mass at the Catholic church with the promise of “some new tunes” her father’s been working on with his accordion. It’s a Polka Mass, as it turns out, and Eveleth’s priest at the time, Father Frank Perkovich, appears as himself in the film, providing a homily about the men out of work that leads to an after-Mass spat between June and her mother.

     Hanson’s cast and crew also had access to Eveleth’s July 4^th parade (the day they started shooting), featuring the Eveleth Clown Band, and complete access to Eveleth’s mine, no doubt an outcome of the time they put in living in the town. In the film one of the miners wears a helmet with the name “Maki” stenciled on the brim and when the end credits roll, there’s a slew of Makis who’ve worked on the film in many capacities as both crew and supporters. Mining families quickly generalized that degree of participation to film-making once they got the chance.

     Hanson explains the impact of his initial encounter with the town. “I had been crewing with Northern Lights” – Rob Nilsson’s 1978 film about the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, part of the Populist movement that swept the Midwest around 1900, and a first feature project of the San Francisco-based film collective, CineManifest – “and was coming through Minneapolis. The public radio station wanted a fund-raiser screening, so we did that on a Saturday night in Grand Rapids. On Sunday they took me to Eveleth – this town perched on this vast pit. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”

     Hanson met Tom Bower in Los Angeles when he was casting the film, introduced by Robert and Lily Young. Hanson says Bower had just finished acting in director Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez with Edward James Olmos, which finally premiered in 1982 in the first season of television’s legendary drama series, American Playhouse. “I’d seen him on-screen and when we met it was immediate – I gave him the role of Rick the next day. I like to bring actors to a place well before we shoot. He also came to Bayfield early and learned how to fish.”

     The forty days it took to shoot Wildrose made it a long shoot by indie standards in those days. “We didn’t work six days a week on this and I didn’t want to get into overtime. There was no question that we’d have to have a union crew, given that it was a mining town with a union, which was unusual for a low-budget film. There was a branch of the television union in New York City and I knew some of them and that made sense. Also we were one of the first films in this country to shoot on Super 16, intending to blow it up to 35 millimeter because it was faster and lighter. We used ten-minute magazines so you could shoot longer.”

     Wildrose premiered in the town next door – Virginia – because Eveleth didn’t have a movie theater, in July 1984. Since Syracuse is also a place where a burgeoning group of indie filmmakers live, work and use local casts crews and settings, I asked Hansom about the effect Wildrose had on Eveleth residents when they saw themselves and their community on the big screen – this was a film, after all, that hired many laid-off miners. I suspect we see ourselves differently here now and I wondered if Wildrose were transformative too.

     “It played a long time and people went to see it many times,” Hanson said. “We still lived there too! It stimulated a lot of discussion when people saw their lives on-screen. There was also talk about the need to do more about domestic violence and drinking. Really, it launched us – living there and the people liking us. After that we went on to film festivals.”

     Hanson also eventually settled in Bayfield in 1995. He’d gone back a number of times, made a documentary about the fishermen, and in the late 1980s began the Bayfield Video Archives, what became more than 250 interviews with Bayfield elders – the same kind of long-term archive labor of love that Dan Ward, who hopes to meet Hanson here in Syracuse during the festival, has been amassing at the Erie Canal Museum here.

     Tom Bower views Robert Young’s Gregorio Cortez, involvement in the Sundance Institute and his relationships with the CineManifest crowd as comprising the deep roots of his own indie film career. He’s worked in plenty of Hollywood film features, on television and stage (you can see his extensive showreel at TomBowerActor.com), but maintains these relationships, nurtured over decades and still very active – Nilsson was in Bologna this past summer at the International Film Academy with the festival’s artistic director, Owen Shapiro, and Bower hopes to get there another summer – still offer a viable and vital model for new generations of indie filmmakers. These include long-term relationships with the subjects and settings of their films and with each other across many projects, which perhaps echoes the family network involvement of, say, the Mesabi Range miners, and a direct hand in marketing films.

     “The finances and distribution of film has been up and down since the 70s,” Bower says. “All the studios have had a ‘classics section’ at some point, but many have phased them out. SONY Classics is now mostly foreign films – they just didn’t know what to do with Bob Young’s Caught” – the 1996 film, starring Young favorite Edward James Olmos and nominated for an Indie Spirit Award for Young’s direction, which screened in this festival a couple years ago – “and Searchlight does a good job, but they need a high box office to make it worth their while. It’s even tougher now because so much of the audience goes to cable TV. A deal has to have a TV component to raise the money. And Lions Gate acquires films but then doesn’t do much with them or releases them on demand. One way that’s still open is the festival circuit. We toured with Gregorio Cortez for two years before we got picked up. That’s important for smaller films because we can’t compete with the malls. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson did that with Northern Lights and Rob still does it – he takes contributions and sells DVDs at these screenings, and he’s made forty movies in forty years. It’s called ‘four-walling’ – you rent the theater and projector and provide all the elements. [John] Cassavetes four-walled all his films.”

    

     When Bower and I first talked by phone about his coming to Syracuse with Wildrose for the film festival, he somewhat cagily mentioned in passing that there was “another film about the miners in the Mesabi Range too, called North Country.” Directed by Niki Caro (who wrote and directed Whale Rider in 2002) in 2005, North Country is also set in Eveleth, and featured a star-heavy cast – Charlize Theron and Frances MacDormand, both Oscar-nominated, along with Jeremy Renner, Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Bean, and Richard Jenkins – and a sensational sexual harassment trial based a real case but with the plot addition of a childhood rape revelation. I’d seen North Country myself, but when Bower added that he thought Wildrose is a better film, I resolved to see it again. Turns out that Tom Bower had a small part in North Country too – he said that the children of people he knew during the filming of Wildrose said hello to him during this shoot – and when we talked again a couple weeks later, we compared.

     North Country’s story is set in 1989, but based on a book about the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the US, Jensen v. Eveleth Taconite Company, filed in 1984. (Lois Jensen didn’t cooperate with the film but her residence in Eveleth overlapped with that of Hanson and the Wildrose folks. Hanson says he knew about her lawsuit but didn’t think she’d win at the time). Setting the two films side by side, a contrast emerges between the Hollywood studio product (Warner Brothers) – even a very good one with both critical and box office success – and the more organic indie movie. North Country seems to borrow many elements from Wildrose, beginning with the early aerial shots of the mine that dwarfs everything around it. North Country’s mine, however, is not the Eveleth mine, which the production never got permission to use – instead, they had to use a New Mexico mine to shoot those scenes.

     However, the sharpest contrast regards what the story is really about in each film. Wildrose is not only about work – it celebrates work well done and what it earns and the toll it takes, is actually interested in work, and lingers on what comprises work. We see June building her cabin, we see Rick teaching her how to fish, we see what it takes to work in the mine, how come driving a big rig instead of descending into the pits was such a prize assignment and even how the hardest and dirtiest of jobs was a source of pride and independence. In North Country, work becomes something else – the backdrop, perhaps, or the scenery. There is simply not the intimate familiarity with either the town or the mines to result in a three-dimensional portrait of the work done there itself. The blazing drama in North Country is in the court room; the real story is the shame and violence of constant sexual harassment, and damage of a long-ago secret rape. Both films tell the story of a woman who leaves a violent marriage and goes to work in an iron mine, only to meet resistance from male co-workers, but watch them together and you will see the difference between Hollywood and indie cinema. Bower’s right: the scrappy little Wildrose is the better movie.

     Bower has worked steadily and, beyond the new film Runoff, has several projects wrapped up – a part in Ulrich Thomsen’s In Embryo, and one of the leads in Ron Vignone’s Garner, Iowa (the first feature to come out of Project Cornlight, an initiative to make movies in Iowa) – and others he’s deep into, such as actor Ed Harris’ adaptation of the novel, The Ploughman. He says it’s “all part of the Sundance Institute chain: like-minded people making localized films. We walk a mile in someone else’s shoes in a dark room with no intrusion and it has an effect on us.”

_____

Wildrose screens at the Palace Theater, 2384 James Street, on Wed. October 14^th, at 7:00 PM, launching the 2015 Syracuse International Film Festival. Tickets are $10.